Asheville accelerator encourages importing of great ideas

Accelerating Appalachia, the first-of-its-kind, nature-based business accelerator program based in Asheville, is dominated by hometown ventures.

These local ideas — from a bark house to lotion to pizza — were on full display at Monday’s pitch presentations at Highland Brewing.

The presentation is one of the final steps in the Accelerating Appalachia program, which started Oct. 3. The next step: The awarding of two $50,000 investments to the top companies. Throughout the program, participating entrepreneurs assess one another and provide peer mentoring and feedback. The top-ranked two teams are selected for funding by their peers.

We will have to wait to see if this money go to an Asheville-based company. But all but one of the 11 companies in the program comes from Western North Carolina, so there is a pretty good chance this $100,000 will be invested in our community.

“In mid-January, we will be bringing the peer-ranked entrepreneurs with investors for them to begin that conversation and do a deeper dive into completing the investment,” said Sara Day Evans, founder and executive director of Accelerating Appalachia.

The 12-week curriculum is designed to help participants “distill their business model and begin these conversations.”

The program creators, however, are committed to helping these businesses after the program’s conclusion. “Our commitment is to follow up and assist them for at least another year,” she said.

During the presentations, however, I noted that importing innovative ideas from other communities is another potential for the accelerator.

That’s exactly what they have already done by inviting Veterans to Farmers from Denver to be part of the inaugural class.

Buck Adams, who had six minutes to pitch his company, convinced me of this idea’s value in about 30 seconds.

In 2009, Adams, a Marine Corps veteran, established Circle Fresh Farms, turning 12,000 square feet of greenhouse into five acres of organic farming in three years.

In 2011, Adams decided to train and hire fellow veterans, starting with a group of six. “I wanted to pay it forward,” he said. He was moved by how some of these veterans who previously “couldn’t hold jobs for more than 90 days” were so moved by their work in the greenhouse.

“They were touching life, growing food and presenting it to the community,” he said. Word quickly got out about the program, and the list of participants grew to 300. He then turned the Circle Fresh Farms experience into the Veterans to Farmers program. They are expanding their pilot program in Denver and are “getting ready to deploy two more farms in the Colorado area,” Adams noted.

He talks about “redeploying” the community farm in America, which is a desperate need in North Carolina. (I learned from the Smoking J’s Fiery Foods presentation that North Carolina is losing farms at the highest rate in the country.)

Adams’ vision is simple: To employ veterans and rebuild farming systems on a local level that is sustainable — and scalable. Sounds like a plan that would totally be at home in Asheville, right?

And because of Accelerating Appalachia, Veterans to Farmers is likely to launch an East Coast outpost in Asheville. Adams mentioned in his pitch he is talking with Asheville Urban Farms to bring the program here.

Asheville Urban Farms, located in an Amboy Road warehouse uses hydroponic systems in the 10,000-square-foot space. There, the organization grows more than 25,000 plants each year.

Adams celebrated this connection and potential partnership during the presentation, noting that he took a risk to come to Asheville from Denver for Accelerating Appalachia. But the relationships that he’s created through the accelerator has made his participation already “pay off,” he noted.

I hope the Veterans to Farmers program does put down roots here soon; it’s a business with rich moral rewards. Not only would it benefit our community, a Veterans to Farmers Asheville location would demonstrate the benefits of organizations like Accelerating Appalachia looking outside of our area for perfect-fit ideas.

Asheville boasts an impressive amount of great ideas for a town this size. But it’s refreshing to learn from what other people are doing to solve problems and create jobs in their hometowns. I think sometimes we can’t see past our own mountain ridges, and we miss out on other visions that could improve life in the valley.

Evans shared with me another interesting import/export twist: They’ve received interest from other communities to launch similar programs. “People seem to like the model and it is replicable,” she said. “We have some tweaking to do before that; I just want to be thoughtful for how we go about that … we want to make sure we maintain a lot of integrity in this program and that it reflects the region that it’s in.”